001. Why We Celebrate How Women Do Business - Pilot Episode

Welcome. I am marketing expert and business coach Melissa Kellogg Lueck. And this is the Doing Business Like a Woman podcast where we are exploring and teaching you how women are reinventing the way business is done and money is made to help you create greater impact and financial freedom one business at a time. Well, hello and welcome to the podcast. This is the pilot episode, my first episode and the first time I have ever recorded a podcast on my own. I've been on podcasts of others, but this is so exciting. This has been a dream in the making for probably, I don't know, four years. I'm looking here at my podcast Mike, and I think I bought it four years ago thinking I was going to start a podcast and now I've finally done it. So here we are. I'm Melissa and I am so glad to be with you. I am so glad that you are here and so grateful for your time today. And I am wanting to just create a space for you and me to celebrate and document and share and learn from each other as women and how we do business because we do business differently. And I used to think that was a problem. I wanted to be one of the boys. I thought if I was going to be successful, I had to do it like a man. And I have discovered that is not true, that we can create our own way of doing business that is aligned, that is natural and full of fun and ease and enjoyment for us and still make a shit ton of money. And I am proof of that myself. I have clients and colleagues that are also proof of that. So I just love watching us as women, just create a whole new way of doing business. And that's why I'm here and what I want to celebrate together with you. And so I wanted to start out with some statistics about women in business and women owned businesses. There are, in 2019, there was 18, 17 new women owned businesses created every day. I don't have numbers for this year, but it's probably very similar. Can you imagine? I just love that. I also wanted to share that 88% of our businesses create less than $100,000 a year in revenue. So I felt so inadequate for the last, I don't know, probably, well, I should say maybe the first 12 years of my business because I was a five figure revenue generator consist recently mid five figures. And I always felt like everybody else was doing better than I was, that I was inadequate. I wasn't, you know, great at building business. But now once I learned that statistic, I was like, heck yes. You know, those of Us earning five figures, we are doing amazing. And so you are in the majority if that's you. I also know that for myself and for many of the women I work with and talk to, we want to be earning and creating more than 100k in revenue. And that is one of my missions on this planet is to help as many women that want to, to create businesses that earn multiple six figures or even seven figures. 98% of business women owned businesses earn less than a million dollars. So those of us that make it to seven figures, we are in the creme de la creme of women owned businesses. And the good news is people, the number of businesses women owned businesses generating $1 million increased by 46% in the last 11 years according to American Express, versus 12% for all businesses. So that is great news. We are creating $1 million revenue businesses faster as women than the general pop rest of the population or businesses in general. So I think that's great news. Also, women owned businesses generate 1.9 trillion. I think we can just round that to 2, 2 trillion dollars in revenue for the U.S. economy in 2019. And women owned businesses represent 42% of all U.S. businesses in 2019. Despite the challenges that we face, female founders get significantly less venture capital funding than male founders and women owned startups pay higher interest rates on funding compared to men. So I think we are doing amazing as women at building businesses, creating businesses, creating revenue. And I want you to know that you are exactly where you're supposed to be right now in your business and you don't have to do business like a man. And a little bit about my story, like I was saying, I tried to be one of the boys in my early years of my career and early years of my business. I founded my business 16 years ago in 2005. Before that I worked in software, sales and marketing and technology and then mortgage and banking and all in sales and marketing roles, mainly marketing roles really, and very male dominated industries. I had no women role models really in my early career. And so I thought to be successful I had to do it the guy's way, right? And so that never, I never really felt at home in those environments. And so that resulted for me in lots of feelings of inadequacy and failure. And then of course all the harassment that comes along with that and you know, the pet names that bosses would call me and just all of the discriminatory type behavior. And I just got sick of it. I got sick of working with men and them always, you know, trying to bed me down. And it made me really want to hide and to stay small and to stay behind the scenes. And it has taken me years of being my own in my own business to really come out from that and really want to make, you know, become a larger force and to go bigger and take up more space. And so I loved founding my own business where I could do everything my own way. And for me, my own way was about focusing on generating revenue. In the beginning, I didn't get distracted with fancy logos and websites. I built my own website. I kept it simple. I avoided overthinking and just wanted to find opportunities and try everything. And this kind of goes against everything I learned as an MBA student. I got my MBA in marketing from Hofstra University, and none of the things I did in starting my business were things I learned as an MBA student. I really had to invent my own way of building my business. And I focused on doing top notch work and making myself indispensable to my clients and building great relationships with them. And we as women are fantastic at creating connections and relationships and it's all, that's how we do business. And through all of that, I never thought very highly of myself and my experience, my abilities. I was still experiencing the leftover kind of feelings of inadequacy from working in corporate environments. And consequently, I didn't even raise my prices for the first 10 years of my business, which I do not recommend. I talk to my clients all the time about raising prices now. And it was so funny because even when I started raising my prices, my clients congratulated me. They're like, finally, you're raising your prices. We're so proud of you. And yes, we'll happily pay them. And it really hasn't been until the last five years that I've begun my begun to understand and own my own worth and my own value, my value to the marketplace and really step up and admit what I really wanted and acknowledge and celebrate what I've created over the years. And now I am so blessed to be able to teach my clients how to do the same. And so doing so has made me so much better at what I do and has allowed me to take my skills and my value to the next level, especially in the service of women. And speaking of the service of women, I went through an experience in 2015 when I was cleaning my shower and listening to a podcast where a woman was talking about creating a program to help moms and women start and grow businesses. And in that moment, it was like I was struck By a bolt of lightning and my heart's desire, it just became apparent to me that that was what I wanted to do. I wanted to help women also to grow their businesses and earn their own money and to experience that financial freedom and experience the opportunity to live fully and freely as themselves and generate money from what they love doing and from their passion. And so. So I. There I was like standing in the shower listening to this podcast, crying. It had never occurred to me before that I could actually choose who I wanted to work with. And so that kicked off a whole new pursuit for me, a whole new dream for me. But I kept my dream hidden, as sometimes we do, because I was afraid. I was afraid of what others were going to think, what they would say. I was afraid. I didn't want to be labeled as a militant feminazi or anything like that. But in 2016, I ended up going to a women's business conference. And during that conference in the evening, as I was in my room taking notes and doing a lot of thinking, I just got like the full download. It just came out of me, the business that I wanted to create and it's. It's the business I have now, thankfully. And. But I kept it quiet and tried to scale my business in a lot of other different ways because I thought it was too my. I thought my vision was too big and too bold and so I didn't bring it out and so I kept it quiet and. And then in 2017, I was sitting in church and as plain as day, this question popped into my head came to me. The question was, what would I do if I believed that the Lord is pleased with me and I'm never alone? And it just hit me like a ton of bricks because I had been avoiding my dream and my vision because I was afraid of what other people thought of me. I was afraid of going too big. And just in that moment that people pleasing, instinct or habit that I was in was just wiped away. Not to say that I don't people please, because I still do. It's definitely a very well worn neuro pathway for me. I love people pleasing and trying to control what other people think of me. But that's a story for another episode anyhow that just released me to really pursue my passion and my vision. And so I began coaching in 2019 full time and I loved it. I absolutely loved it. And I have been working with and providing done for you marketing services and content creation for small businesses since the founding of my business in 2005. And so I had Tons of experience, tons to offer, tons of expertise. But the piece that had been missing for me was really the mindset piece and really developing my self concept and my self esteem and understanding that what I thought about myself and my business was affecting my ability to grow and scale. And so once I cleaned that up and really got coached myself and learned about coaching in turn, I couldn't help but turn around and want to offer that as part of the services that I provide. And so I did begin coaching in 2019 and 2020. Even in the midst of the pandemic, I tripled the size of my business and my client loads and have earned well over six figures as a coach. And my goal is to create a million dollar company teaching and coaching women how to make more money and create more choices and freedom for themselves and their family by having their own business and by doing business like a woman and in having the freedom to live the full expression of yourself and of herself unapologetically. And so I wanted this episode, this pilot episode to be my story and to kind of be our manifesto, so to speak, and the rallying cry that I want to lead that we as women have only scratched the surface of the businesses that we will create and build. And back in 1972, the year after I was born, actually a very small number, very small percentage of women owned businesses were in existence. Now, like I said earlier, we make up 42% of all US businesses. In the process, we are reinventing the way business is done. And so I just want to encourage you in that. And so in this podcast, we will be exploring how women are doing business differently, the ways that we can incorporate our unique capabilities and gifts to market and grow our business. We will also be hearing from other successful women entrepreneurs and how they're doing it, how they're doing business differently as a woman and balancing all the things that we balance as women. And so if this resonates with you, I invite you to subscribe to join me weekly for this podcast and I also want to celebrate with you and hear how you are doing business like a woman. Please connect with me on Instagram and Facebook or LinkedIn. The links will be in the show notes and tell me your story and I want to celebrate you as we explore this topic together. And I'm so glad that you joined me today and I hope to see you next week on the podcast. Bye for now. If you like this podcast and want to take this work deeper, I invite you to coach with me one on one. It all starts with a conversation let's get on a call together and I'd love to learn more about you and your business, and together we can identify what is standing in the way of creating the business and life you envision. And then we'll create a plan to get you there. So visit my website site@melissamkellog.com and find a spot on my calendar. I look forward to seeing you.